Most of this is a "guest column".
Amendments like putting Tia Knight where she belongs on this front page, as Dom quite rightly requests in a forceful post-script, can probably wait since this is supposedly a day of rest.
I didn't plan to log anything soon after yesterday's huge Fugue in the Old Style in the Orchard, but the "music" in this just knocked me out ... nicely so.
I'd like to share Dom A. because he put much ghost-writing into doing this for me before taking off for the Mediterranean part of France. Some things I find too private to log and I translate a paragraph or three that arrived in Dom's mother tongue:
'Werd' ich entschweben...'?†
"Thank you for calling me a kinder pal, Nick. You'd think I know the meaning of 'pal', but it was a new word since I picked up English neither in your native country nor in America.
"I rejoice to find you heard me out and made a return to the writing genre you renounced last year. Perhaps you should occasionally do this again, no? Save that equally I understood the image you've given of recovering a whole aspect of your life you once believed 'fallen like an eroded cliff into the sea' of your destiny. Then it may be that the music Log remains your way ever forward [...] like when I met you on Friday last.
"I miss Monsieur [Tony] Brock.* It was strange to learn first from your blog of your friendship with a man whom I believed to have kept during his long life in France a humanistic warmth and such qualities of a 'true gentleman' that I'd asked myself could he have retained a manner so 'perfectly English' had his choice not been your own, to leave.
"Then let me be your latest guest contributor, after him [...].
"One day I should ask Marie why she has called you 'British Airways'.**
"Have you understood how appropriate we find this appellation, some of us, when your swift daily stride from your home to the Métro seems often to be that of a man who flies the sidewalk of the street, descending briefly to greet those for whom you are yourself become an entire part of the rich colour of le quartier?
"We find you a mystery. Some say you are gay, those who don't know you with your daughter or never see you, as sometimes I have, with a woman for companion. I hope such details don't trouble you, Nick, in light of the story you've told. [...] For almost three months, I and my wife missed so evident a connection as the one between you and Taliesin's Log, which she started to read in November 2003.
"On Friday I found you a mystery phantom, you seemed so pale and weakened by the day's grand adventures, and was hesitant myself to suggest you start writing of such things again. But you have a strength, a strange strength, and you'll recall that in the novel by Philip K. Dick you drew on last week there is much talk of Faustus. And thus I encourage you!
"Are you yourself a Faustus?
Is this it, the secret of the changes in your Log?
There has been such a change since the summer in your writing that you may tell us you have foresworn abstraction and what in your Orchard you call 'fuckin' filosofy'! But this is a conceit, one I can understand in a man of your country, stung when Napoleon called the English a 'nation of shopkeepers'; the expression, which I learned myself from an Irishman, was no insult on the part of that astute monomaniac [...]
"You've long been under a Faustian spell.
Suzanne [I've not met Dom's wife] last year was surprised when you left Taliesin's Log largely intact on the subject of your malady, now brought fully into the light of day, and also some courageous details regarding your comportment with women. She is without doubt a courageous woman too, this Eleanor with whom you became so obsessed for some months, to permit your freedom of expression. A generous soul!
"You're right, it is soul, a generosity of soul [de l'âme], not merely of mind [de l'esprit] and of heart [du coeur], manifest in your friend, to have enabled her to have let you tell such a story. I would never have left those items in your Orchard if I were a blogger, never without a Suzanne in my heart to remind me how I became so engrossed in that story, a man like yourself who might have taken such a path. Then Eleanor understands also and clearly she was the woman to rid your mind of those abstractions, but if she is as you have sketched her, she's too grounded to play to your Faust!***
"You are too modest, Nick. You may think of yourself as a citizen of all a world, but it's a wearying English trait you've kept for the rest of this planet to be over-modest; it's perhaps acceptable on that island, less so among we French who delight in our scholarship and our learning. The arrogant brashness of Americans, Australians and [ ...there followed a list of other easily acceptable stereotypes only] is so much easier to understand than any fake mannerisms of a class-obsessed society you've yet fully to shake off [...]
"Do this, mon Faustus! For what your Log has become, in your profound understanding of women musicians and the scholarship you try to wear too lightly, leading only to perplexity on occasion, is none other than one man's Faustian quest for the Eternal Feminine, in yourself and now in 'Voices of Women'; it's this, rather than a projection any longer of some archetypal principle on to the women in your life.
 "That pale phantom I met on Friday, shored up almost literally on to his feet by Tia Knight -- you were so engrossed in her music you didn't see me for some minutes, did you? -- has become a teacher.
I understand your reluctance, we read what you say of it, but you must accept your destiny: music truly is magic, you've understood this, you have grasped its powers and something has happened to you and still you hesitate!
"You did write well tonight, again, of our quartier, of people we know, so why hide it? What so compels you still to separate out the music from that "life you are getting" and some of us in it, relegated to your Orchard, and now to find any qualitative difference between the music you write about and that other music in people? It's a false distinction, Nick. You'll fall into your own ancient trap of taking 'fuckin' filosofy' for some feared enemy. You live in a nation where there still remains too much bad philosophy, fake philosophy, pseudo-philosophy, that is true, and sexual philosophy also!
"Keep the spells and charms you have, but lose the false spell, mon ami.
Suzanne says she suspects the practical women you so love and admire have cowed you into submission. Et moi, I suspect Suzanne is right. [As for me, I take the point, but intend to keep having an Orchard. It's an intuitive thing.] You've been writing of the mood swings of depression, such as we know them too, the both of us. Perhaps we too are what you call 'cluster thinkers'.**** Are you afraid now of the networks you really should make?
Have you become so frightened of ideas as abstractions and what these have done in your life you're going to throw out the baby with the bathwater? You strongly risk making another swing, Nick, understand this. You need an intellect and the risk of abstraction sometimes to clarify your insights and your "intuitions". Don't make an intellectual swing now, don't fear your own ideas and their power to reach others.
"If you decide to print my advice, don't put it in The Orchard, I pray you. It's now a chill hour before dawn. We're leaving for Carcasonne [...] soon and won't be back for some weeks. Suzanne is driving, of course! [...] Tony respected you as a teacher, remember that. And I have a story about you, young British Airways: your gift from me, it will surprise you.
"Do you recall a brunette woman with a violin case and using her boyfriend's iPod Mini? You began a conversation with her in the Métro at around a quarter past eight one evening, 10 weeks ago, and she enjoyed it? She was interested in what you call 'Songlines', remember, and asked if you had a few "sunny dreams" ("rêves ensoleillés") as songlines for her. Then you looked at her iPod and you wrote her down a few suggestions, classical and jazz. She laughed and thanked you for those when you got off the train at Duroc station.
"How do I know this? I was sitting right behind the pair of you. You never noticed me, but [...] I told Suzanne they were true, things you sometimes write about meeting people on subway trains. Once you had gone, I slid round where you had been sitting and started talking to the woman myself, about you! If you are surprised already, here's another one, because you didn't ask her name, did you?
"It's Camille, Nick, just like the musician where you left off last month, and we went on talking right to the end of the line, where she was descending. We talked about other musical people as well, but she called you a "sort of magician". [...] You didn't tell her about your log, but I'd divine that now she reads it. I told her about it and her English is good. [...] That was when you had begun writing about the Dreamtime and I told Camille about this because you seem to understand what the Dreamtime really is, somehow.
"'I have several threads to pick up on this log for sure,' you wrote last Tuesday.
That's one of them, the Dreamtime; you still haven't put those pieces back in your puzzle after you lost a few articles. But you gave this the air of a duty! How very English of you for a good citizen of nowhere and everywhere. It's no duty. You're a convalescent today. You are still striving hard to pull out of a very, very difficult time. [...] Camille understood the Dreamtime too because she has lived in Australia and knows the aboriginal sense of the expression, and she told me, 'A dreamer is necessary to know the Dreamtime. Your friend Nick must be a very good dreamer."
"Dreaming is a sort of magic, Nick, a magic that heals, a white magic, and your Log is going there as well. Then go with your Log, ride the music. It's not just a compass you need. You love flying. Have you ever practised equitation?***** For Suzanne, there is a symphony by Shostakovich, his last [number 15, one with a few musical jokes in, a short one too] she hears like a "good horsewoman". She's reading over my shoulder now.
Nick, learn from the animals we are if you want to teach them as you must. Your Log isn't a duty. A river it may be, like our lives, a whole number of rivers even. 'Subterranean and on the surface,' Suzanne suggests. 'It's all in Nick's flow, when he brings what is under the surface up into the light of day and tells us stories about who we are. Remind him of what he quoted from Eliot a long time ago.'
[In publishing this, just like I when read Dom's words this morning, Suzanne's saying that sends a shiver down my spine and brings tears welling just behind my eyes, because it's such an important reminder. Touche!:]
"Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,
I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
To be wonderful and youthful, after all."
[borrowed in 'Of homicide and heart's ease, May 2004' and -- this time I want to pinch rather more than what once I did in The Orchard, as reminded, the italicised part:]
'We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.******
"Nick, to hear the music in animals, you can't pick up the reins by forcing the flow. It frightens people when you're scared, you've said so yourself often enough. To teach, learn to be at one with the horse, it's alive, and horses can swim.
"We must go very soon now. You've got your music back.
Take your own counsel: go with the flow, let the music steer you [...]
"Je t'embrasse, mon cher cavalier!
"'Moi aussi, très fort," echoes Suzanne.
"Dom A.
"p.s. If you don't put Tia Knight on the front page, you nincompoop, you'll pick up the pissed-off vibes all the way from Perpignan!"
________
Well, "orders is orders."
Tia Knight comes out of The Orchard.
Because there's thunder in the air and magic around, I bet Eliot -- who's so good at giving me spine shivers that one day I may dare publish the whole of my 'Gaïa's Complaint' poem tribute to him in the The Orchard, more than 40 pages of it -- didn't need geographical flow-charts to know that our "rivers" and other waterways all come from the same place and go back there in the end...
†That cheeky bit of German means I think a bit of Mahler's 8th might be in order; plenty of women in the 'Symphony of a Thousand'. It's a line from Goethe's 'Faust', as I finally recall, when he takes off:
"With wings that I have earned
In the struggle of love
I shall fly upwards
To the light no eye has reached!"
Now those footnotes:
*It was from one stop further north of the Duroc M station Dom mentions that I gave you a little of Tony's music when he died, in A morning chez St François-Xavier.
**Marielle didn't invent this local monicker for me. Hugues the barman did, but she uses it even more. As do others.
***Hmm. If Ellie had actually read what I sometimes wrote when that Orchard was her secret place, though it was never about her private life, I wonder about this. But not for long. Because she's not the only person I know with what Dom calls "generosity of soul", a distinction I'd happily make myself and do.
****'Cluster thinking' is a term I've borrowed again.
It's amazing, how many different ways of thinking people have, every one of us, while a superb encyclopaedia, 'The Oxford Companion to the Mind,' edited by Richard L. Gregory (1987, 1998 for my own edition) holds that we "human animals" function with more than half a dozen differently measured kinds of "intelligence".
There's fun in this, because some of my buddies know I've got an abnormal IQ, rather high and rising as I get older, which isn't supposed to happen. In me, this only makes any sense if I posit an SQ of which I've told them. [(Intelligence Quotient of 147] - [SQ (Stupidity Quotient of 149)] = NLIQ (Natural or Normal Life Intelligence Quotient) of -2. This is why NB, B.A.†† flies below the radar. I need to work on that...
††'British Airways,' not bachelor of anything!
*****My experience of riding horses was never as successful as swimming. But at least I wasn't quite as unfortunate as a beloved cousin who as a wild youth was preening himself uneasily on horseback in front of some Girl Scouts when some bastard suddenly kicked his beast into a gallop. The same only happened to me with a dromedary in a part of the Sahara that was good for soft landings.
******The real shiver here is how I'm reminded of this just after choosing the icons for two partitions on my Mac while it's still undergoing an overhaul. The symbol for my side is now a lightning bolt, or fire, while the one for the other side, unsurprisingly now named "lilith" and wide open for the Kid or any friends who wish to use the machine is ... a rose.
Oh and speaking of roses, it is Saint George's Day (Wikipedia). Painting courtesy of them, by Raphael, not to be muddled up with the hero of the recently mentioned 'Lamb Lies Down on Broadway'.
6:43:53 PM 
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